read write prompt #53

by Nathan Moore

In honor of Read Write Poem’s first birthday, for our collaborative prompt this week we’ll go back to the first ever Read Write Poem prompt, which was, in fact, collaborative.

Here’s how Dana started that prompt:

Welcome to the first-ever Read Write Prompt. This week, we’ll focus on American Sentences. Some people don’t like the name, but please don’t be put off by it. It’s simply the name Allen Ginsberg chose for this poetry form, which is a single sentence of 17 syllables. You can read more about American Sentences at www.americansentences.com, where Paul Nelson talks about them in detail.

For this exercise, we’ll write an American Sentence. The original prompt suggested collaboration by finding someone on the participant page, emailing them and working together to write sentences back and forth in response to one another or writing a sentence word by word together.

For this post, we’ll see how American Sentences might be combined to form a single poem, with different people each contributing a sentence to the overall poem. If you would like, leave one American Sentence in the comments section of this post. When we post the Get Your Poem On post, we’ll include our group poem at the bottom of that post on Thursday. You can read the result of the original experiment here.

We’re asking everyone to leave an American Sentence in the comments section of this post. Comments will be open until midnight Tuesday (CST).

When it’s time to Get Your Poem On, we’ll have a free day of sorts: You’ll be invited to link to anything you like. If you’ve written a series of American Sentences, you can link to that. Or feel free to link to something in response to one of our other prompts or another poem you’d like us to read. Whatever you want to do. We’re easy that way. And, happy anniversary again. This is a celebration of all you’ve done in the last year and all you’ve made Read Write Poem.

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32 comments to (collaborative) read write prompt #53: birthday collaboration!

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